coverage of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. it's all available on demand c-span.org/coronavirus. watch white house briefings, updates from governors and state officials, tractor spread throughout the u.s. and the world with interactive maps. watch on demand anytime from unfiltered c-span.or c-span.org/coronavirus. >> thank you all for coming. you're on a channel called microsoft virus destiny. this is a discussion in which we will reveal how microbes are

secret puppet masters. i guess i should start out by pointing out that irises are microbes as well. it made sense to call this this is a young, a writer for the atlantic, author of a new book called multitudes of other microbiota microbes of our panel. here is paul, a science writer for the new york times and other many books including most recently, a planet of viruses. i'm an author of a book called pandemic about how microbes cause academics and all of these folks are going to be for sale by barnes & noble and will sign them after this session signing table h. i hope you can come join us for more discussion. first, before we start, i would like to ask is anyone here in

microbiologist? okay, we've got four. we can't make anything up. [laughter] i think it's really interesting time to talk about microbiology because there is a paradigm shift in recent years. if think back to the late 19th century, we thought about microbes mostly as these intruders we have to target with physical physician, military might. i call that approach microbial xenophobia. it made sense back then in the beginning because it's the microbe we could detest. the ones that would grow in a dish in a lab and often the ones we are responsible for

tuberculosis and anthrax etc. what we now know through prophets, microbes are everywhere. they are all around us. it is really there planners. so all of our interactions have evolved in the context of a microbial world. now i know everything from our immune system to boot to dietary preferences, all are linked to the interaction between microbes. we need a new way of thinking about microbial world and our face in it which is why i think the work they do is so important right now to try to get all of us to understand the science and what it means. i think there's a real urgency for that question. i think we can all agree that microbial xenophobia as a paradigm has basically failed.

we've seen increasing emergency, highly resistant bacterial pathogens including some that can resist every class of antibiotics that we can. the chemical onslaught is creating a worse problem in many ways. over the last few years, we had over 300 pathogens emerge. mike is eager virus. these are in the original habitats. it is benign in the environment. a couple of years ago, ebola killed 11000 people. in west africa. we'll have a conversation with you guys. i want to start with carl, every time we have one of these new microbes on the scene, i feel like our response ranges from powerlessness but on one hand it's either panic and hysteria

on the other hand, denial and dismissal. where should we fall on the continuum? >> is eager virus it's one of these emerging diseases that has gone from being completely unknown to something we talk abt at the water cooler. within a matter of months. unfortunately, this is not a new thing. it's starting to become familiar routine we are going through, viruses like mers for example is it emerged in the middle east a few years ago and no one even knew about it before. it makes an interesting when you work on a book about viruses so the first edition of my book

came out in 2011 and when you write a book, you get up as much as you can you help it can take stand the test of time. in 2014 from a manager dropped me an e-mail and said you barely say anything about ebola in this book. i think people are going to want to know about ebola. so i had the opportunity to write about ebola so i updated the book in general so the second edition came out in 2015 and mhr there's going to be ebola. the outbreak or something like we have never seen before. ebola had first emerged in 1976 but relatively small outbreak from just a few of the people affected in various parts of central africa and then it looks like in december 2013 from probably the first person to get

sick with a new break in west africa. it really didn't sort of become something people were aware of until spring 2014 by october 2014, it hits peak. actually, it wasn't until june 2016 that the last case was recorded. we've had just a few months without a case of ebola in west africa. this has been years of an outbreak, way bigger than anything before. over 20000 cases 11000 people from 40% mortality rate. that is pretty terrifying. i think this is an opportunity to see how public health could handle something we've been anticipating for a while and i don't think we did very well at

all. the monitoring was terrible, vaccine development was ridiculously low. a vaccine that had been in the works for many years but nobody wanted to pay to do more research because it was like ebola. actually, spring to go on and put the experiment into humans and try to get a vaccine for humans ready and they did testing on it in spring 2015. way after the peak of the epidemic. a lot of people died and many ducts would have been for the vaccine. now in the last few flareups, people are getting what's called vaccination for your vaccinate people in the area around an outbreak to sort of break it from spreading further. that's great, why didn't we have to three years ago?

i tried to get as much as i could into the second edition but i do feel like a third addition now. now we are looking at zika virus. that story is familiar and similar to ebola. we know about zika virus back in the 40s, identified in a monkey in uganda and it turned out people in the area had antibodies to seek a virus which suggested they were being exposed to it. people didn't pay attention to it, one of many obscure viruses, go into your textbooks and find them. that's it. it emerged into mosquitoes because of ebola and in 2007, someone registered in outbreak. this was polynesia. not uganda. somehow this had gone all the

way around the world. there were a couple of more outbreaks relatively small, a few hundred people until last year when they showed up in brazil and then things exploded. as of now, the 2015 outbreak, the one that started last year, 55 printers now that have is eager who didn't have it before. we have a in puerto rico, miami, we have it throughout the new world except for chile and canada. probably because they are not very good for the mosquitoes that carry it. i don't think people are aware how bad things are already. even in the united states. in puerto rico, over 17000 cases in puerto rico, they're not sure

how many of these cases of birth defect from eager virus come. babies felt small brains. in the united states, the latest count is out there are 43 locally acquired cases. this happened just recently they are trying to stop in miami but there's no reason to think it's going to work very well this unmoved. how have we done with his zika virus? i don't think we've done terribly well. here it is in the united states. there's been animal research on vaccines, this is the kind of thing you can vaccinate for but we are probably going to just start testing vaccines may be in january. here in the united states, we can't even put up the money to control this. there are things we can do like

mosquito control and research and vaccines, congress is stuck in political gains, they are not giving up the money. there find, it's estimated cost for caring for these kids that have microcephaly for zika virus, $10 million for a lifetime. that's what we are looking at. we are being incredibly foolish. we are not even being petty, it's just foolish from beginning to end. that's what we are looking at again and i think the other parallel i find striking is that this shows again how remarkable viruses are. it may give you reason to feel happy, i'm here to kind of freak you out. those zika virus has ten genes. coronavirus has seven. we have immune systems we've

evolved for billions of years, they find a way around, they are thriving and spreading all over the world. what's happening is that there are all these viruses, lots of viruses and marking them and they are spilling out as we are basically moving further and further into the system and disturbing bats, monkeys and other wildlife and fair finding a nice and new up on the post. a couple of weeks ago, a great man died, he led the eradication of smallpox. he got rid of smallpox. that's way worse than ebola or zika virus. that killed hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people.

wiped us out from the planet. if you have the dedication, we can actually fight these things but we can't just ignore them and pretend they will take care of themselves. >> he is a bad cop. i think what is interesting is that we are seeing these new pathogens, they come into the human population and at the beginning, it is really horrible. ... . >> yeah, i'm definitely the good cop in this scenario. i don't want to contradict any of the concerns that carl has raised about the book that i wrote, "i contain multitudes", is about the more beneficial side of the microbial world and

i talked about the book i wrote "i contain multitudes" is about the microbial side and i talkow abot microbes have been with us for the longest time. we all live in the microbial world and to this day all of us depend on u microbes were health and development. every human body contains trillions, tens of trillions of bacteria and they help to build our immune system that they digest their food and they protect us from disease and infections and they may even help to shape our behavior, and even viruses. we contain many orders of magnitude more viruses than we have bacterial cells in our body and most of those actually are bacteria a so they aren't harmfl to us. they are parts of this teeming ecosystem that was with them zero so even though we can look like her individuals we are in fact very large teeming and thriving worlds.

i talk about how these microbes are just passengers. they do really important things in our lives. a let's talknt about humans in the animal kingdom. you see all kinds of incredible superpowers that they convey to their host. theyy allow worms, flatworms to regenerate their entire bodies. there are birds which the paint their eggs in antibacterial paste in microbe rich fluids that help to protect the checks from infections. there are even ones that use viruses and coded within their own dna to defuse the immune system of the caterpillars and in this case the virus can be a

useful micro. one thing i wanted to talk about now is a case where humans have actually engineered a relationship between an animal and a microbe to help to improve our health. this ties into one of the stories that carl was talking about. the story begins in 1924 when a couple of microbiologists discovered a new type of material that lived in the cells of insects. they found it in a mosquito which they collected near boston for ages no one knew what this thing was. they didn't know where there was, nor what it did and it took the science is 12 years to give this thing a name. one of them named it after his friend his codiscoverer. it took many decades for anyone to work out what it did but in the 60s and 70s scientists

realize that this thing was actually everywhere. it is an anson beatles and something like 40% of species of insects and other apricots that are are ready the most diverse and rich in numerous on the planet. you could think of it as one of the best pandemics in the history of life. a particular likes males because it's passed from mother to daughter. the males are in use -- useless. they are transformed into females. sometimes allows female insects to prove reproduce by cloning themselves so they have no need for males at all. it's a mutualist as it benefits his host ended that looks for example provides what is missing

from the blood in acts like a living host. some caterpillars use it to stop leaves from turning red in the autumn so that they can sit within the leaves and continue to eat even as the world guys around them. but humans have used for it as well. 25 years australian scientists have been trying to introduce this bacterium into a species of insects that it does not normally in fact andnd that's is the pika mosquito which spreads dengue fever, yellow fever -- and the reason they thought this , one when the tiger mosquito contains it at for some reason becomes really bad at spreading the virus is behind theseom diseases. so wolbachia infected tiger mosquito is a dengue proof or

zika proof one.12 wolbachia is good at manipulating its host in a way that i talked about the end is really good at spreading for a while population. the idea is that if you release a small number of these wolbachia carrying mosquitoes into the wild one of the few generations the entire local wild population should carry this microbe and thus be unable to transmit these important human diseases. this has been tested in the laboratory that's been simulated in mathematical models and was tested in 2011 fort the first time in a couple of australian suburbs where wolbachia infected mosquitoes were resistant to the wild and very quickly in the span of months you saw the prevalence of thisf microbe went from zero to 100% of the mosquitoes in that area.

now the organization that pioneered the approach called eliminate dengue has been testit countries around the world. there is healing up. they are testing testing the apn andil columbia and in asia vietnam. they release mosquitoes that have millions of people to see that approach can indeed work at thats large-scale weather the mosquitoes were spread whether wolbachia will dominate as much as they had expected to and crucially whether that can drive down the transmission of the diseases that cause harm. thepr wolbachia approach has may advantages. has the backing of the world health organization. it is interesting because it is cheap and probably quite safe unlike insecticides which are toxic and need to be continuously re-spread.

wolbachia containing mosquitoes be good to go once you release them once and you'll may need to release them once. there is no modification. it seems that wolbachia stops the spread of these viruses through many different groups through competing with -- and that is reassuring because viruses have a habit of running rings around us and no biologists would back an approach assuming evolution will not get the better of us at some point or another but if the back i'm allows people to resist the viruses o or by a factor for the viruses in many different ways and many different types of viruses would be to evolve which would be hard.

here we have an interesting approach. the point i want to make is all of the curiosity about the more crore real world but in 1920 for the people who discovered wolbachia could not possibly have predicted this was where their sites was going to lead. in fact one of them wolbachia the one who named the bacterium died in the 50s before anyone realized how common it was pretty could not possibly have foreseen where this research would lead to nod in many ways that is the study of the animal microbiome and the microbiome in a nutshell. for the longest time we ignored and neglected microbes thinking it would be irrelevant to us and then we went through period of fearlessness and now we are reaching an era of exploration again and appreciation for realizing the crucial role that

they play in a our lives and the entire animal kingdom and we are starting to manipulate those partnerships for her own ends. our attempt is a little bit fumbling and a bit clumsy but there is tremendous potential here and i think that's where the microbiome will lead us in the future and flights the area of science that strikes me so much and why he felt compelled to write a book about it. to instill that sense of curiosity that led to the discovery of wolbachia and everyone. >> it's interesting, we want to think of microbes in terms of are they good another bad? we are trying to push them into this economy and what you are taught about this the same microbe can behave very differently. >> absolute i say in the book there's no such thing as a good or bad my chrome. my chrome start jersey we need to do destroy us germs is i

thinkla wrong but also as wrong the idea that they are our friendly bacteria and good microbes. we are just another habitat for them. they have been around for billions of years and we f are another world for them much like soil or a drop of water. some are beneficial to their hosts and some are both at the same time. i talk about the lawsuit use viruses. the relationship that microbes have with their hosts are very dynamic. they can change on a dime we need ways of containing and keeping those relationships happening. >> the question is when there's a conflict of interest between the microbes we are encountering likes the guy on smallpox and

ebola and what they want to do and what we want to do and you could define that as disease. happens, right? gn let's put it this way for anything living inside of something else if its activities kill off its host too soon it's bad news. the symbion is going to become extinct echoes that earn down its own house but if you can have a big family and say it's time to leave the house and find another one and then burned down it's okay. so actually these viruses and other pathogens use all the different levels of deadliness and sometimes you can see this in the wild.

for example some fool decided it would give good idea to introduce rabbits to australia and it tookd off and they said how do we control them? there's a horribly deadly virus that kills pearce in europe and they said will bring it to australia problem solved. it started killing them offa le crazy and then it started to become more deadly and is still not a good idea for rabbits to get sick with a virus. the virus evolved and essentially adjusted to the deadliness to be able to get the host and thehe most efficient wy for making more viruses. and it's hard for us because we think about things ashi being gd in bedei is very sort of an egocentric way that these things are not just evolving over the course of a few years. they are evolving over millions

of years in their language does not include it. viruses can be good for us. in fact none of us literally none of us would have been born without viruses because millions of years in the past our ancestors got infected with viruses and theyy actually basically harnessed some of the virus genes and use them as proteins in the placenta. these are crucial in the placenta. if you knock out the gene so foi example mice with have a similar gene you i could knock out that gene and you can't have kids. just doesn't work. recently it was discovered that viruses were harnessed for muscles and their proteins in our muscles that appear to be generated from a virus genes. that is good. but in order to get that good

our ancestors probably went through some horrific hiv like epidemic that nearly wiped out the species and then finally we achieved immunity over them, harnessed a couple of genes and went on from there. the whole language of good and bad doesn't really capture the real strangeness of these little things. >> there's some viruses to play a role invi our immune system. i talk about viruses that infect bacteria and they are called bacterial phages or phages for sure. they look like it don't with legs so it's the idea that we have loads of them in our bodies and some people have them in the lining of the gut in the make is that covers the gut. their millions and trillions of these viruses stuck in the make

us waiting to infect bacteria to pass by and they help keep the population of microbes that live within us and they help to select for this species of microbes that live within us. and it's a good idea but it highlights another aspect of this world we need to keep these populations in line and the balance many of the diseases like zika and ebola are the work of one microbut you can also get illness when communities of microbes shift from a help these dates into an unhealthy one. when no particular member is responsible. it's the entire community is gone out of whack tree in some are more common than others and

maybe have new invading species aren't there anymore and maybe you've lost some critical defense of one's that you see this all over the place.hi you see this in coral and this might apply to the human body too. many alyssa's that it have become common in the 21st century have been linked to changes in the microbiome whether it's diabetes or allergies and asthma or obesity or heart disease. it's still unclear many of these cases whether it changes the microbiome leading to the disease or whether they are a consequence of that principle that it's not one infectious organism leading to ill health that a shift in the community. that is important and we will learn more about that in the decades to come. >> i think it's interesting, your point the cause and effect we still don't know. the probiotics have become such a huge industry already.

this whole idea that if you take the good bacteria and you line your god with all of that is somehow that's going to improve your health but we still don't know if these disease states are sensitive to microbiome changes but did that cause it or did it happen after? there's a limit of how much we can really manipulate our microbiome to probiotics for example. >> it's very hard to probiotics that an attached to them but they don't live up to a lot of them so they seem to be good for some cases those with infectious by and large when you think about all the other conditions linked to the microbiome the evidence of probiotics that can help them is kind of weak or at least inconsistent hand i think that's because these are very difficult problems. there is complicated as forests

are coral reefs. that is a tough thing to do and we are trying to solve the problem by giving products that contain small quantities of bacteria so hundreds of thousands of times lower slower than excess in our body. strains that are not well-suited chosen for starker reason. it's almost like releasing a small number of captive bred animals into the jungle. and hoping that they thrive. and in many cases they don't. there's another project and try. can try giving people large communities of microbes that all go to the gut of the body. is it very unorthodox treatment which is exactly what it sounds like you take stool from a healthy donor and put it in a --

involving a blender and they get better. [laughter] >> i'm not volunteering. >> this is proven to be effective in treating quested 3m did -- clostridium difficile, c. diff that causes severe hard to treat cases of and while antibiotics w can cure a quarter of cases of c. diff infections in clinical trials transplants have had 90% success rates. they've been very very effective even these treatments when you're doing an ecosystem transplant your taken a massive community of microbes and putting them in the person with

the disease community. many trials of transplants and the results are less consistent because here it is hard to reset these worlds. my microbiome -- microbiome is different from yours and yours and how we can manipulate them. how do we get them to establish themselves? to need to feed them a certainin food and give them an advantage? how will they fit against the major microbes in our immune system? >> they are still so much fine-tuning we have to do despite the early successes in this field.

the same time you're talking about the subtle shifts in this fragile that wants than the ecosystem. if you think about our use of e antibiotics 80% of antibiotics are far from animals so that's all over the place. so we are manipulating the concerts at the same time and i wonder he remembered that we need to do more with vaccinations for sure that what does it mean when we are attacking microbes on a grand scale as the background level? how does that provoke some of the more virulent behaviors? when antibiotics came out in the 1940s and it became widespread people would say game over.

and the people that discovered antibiotics at whoa womack womack these things could stop working because of evolution because these bacteria are evolving fast and you could end up with bacteria that are resistant. unfortunately nothing really happened. there was no big resistance stopping crusade back then and now finally we are coming to terms with board and more resistance and it's a real struggle because we don't have a lot of new drugs in the pipeline we are starting to n get, we are starting to see over the horizon a situation where you have a -- that everything we have got so if you get infected with the end you figure out the strain that

combined all these resistance genes there's nothing people can do for you and already it's been estimated maybe 700,000 people the world die of antibiotic arrested and bacterial infections and that could go up unless we do stuff. i don't mean to be the dark cloud in your day. it's the same thing as smallpox. we can do something about this. if people are smart we can solve this problem. we solve smallpox and that was a problem and this is a problem that is solvable. their clear-cut things into to overcome resistance. for example stop using antibiotics on farms. there's huge resistant to that because understandably farmers like to give these antibiotics to animals. they get bigger. more meat, more money. you have to set that against the colossal cost of treating all

the illness from antibiotic resistant bacteria. me to be more creative. her viruses that affect that area and they were discovered over 100 years ago and the doctor who discovered them in people who are sick with dysentery. he realized he could kill resistant bacteria with these viruses and he said whoa this could be a drug. in the 1920s you could buy powder with these viruses. in paris it was being mass-produced and it was quite popular.

antibiotics came on the scene may seem more reliable and retractable because they were chemicals and not alive like viruses are but therese was a shift. we are the onlynd place where stage therapy was used in the soviet union. gettingoldiers were wounded on the battlefront and suffering infections. they were getting viruses on their wounds and in some cases it's working. and since the fall. of the sovit union some of those people came to the united states and scientist tried to bring phage therapy and to american medicine and it's been very slow you can't be 100% sure the viruses you are using are going to kill the bacteria that you want to cure but there is some progress

and there is a major trials going on now in treating people with infections from burns and so on. the ideas instead of one chemical you have a virus and you can dohe lots of things with viruses. can engineerdo a them so if the bacteria start to evolve a resistance to them you can do experiments with the viruses and get them to evolve to do a better job or maybe you can put an extra gene in there to break up the thick film but bacteria can form and there's research on that going on right now. this is theo creativity when he to fight this fight. >> i think is worth saving there has been such an incredible boon to our health. they save so many lives that we use them badly sometimes. there are cost of that

antibiotic resistance among one of the cost. antibiotics are unsubtle weapons and shock and awe weapons. they are not resize. they destroy bacteria that we rely upon and that causes harm so they do shift the microbiome. a lot of people are looking at whether those shifts and how long-lasting they are and they often bounced back from antibiotic assaults but too many assaults any get problems. that's actually why you see these infections happen. they are almost always caused by the antibiotics wiping out creating space for this weedy invader to take hold. people often ask me whether the microbiome tells us that saving

the bacteria we rely upon is very much the same in protecting us from these infections and just scaling back on their use of antibiotics and using them judiciously so we use them when we need to it only when we need to. that involves everything from a cultural shift to technological shifts to being able to diagnose illnesses early. if you have a viral illness you don't prescribe antibiotics. the microbiome has some interesting applications in solving the antibiotic crisis. antibiotics largely are microbial weapons. they allow the bacteria to destroy each other in the fierce competition. leave mine those weapons and we did such a good job could be picked all the low-hanging fruit and we stopped being able to discover new ones very easily.

perhaps the human microbiome bacteria live in our bodies might potentially be a source that a few months ago i wrote about a study about how a new potential antibiotic was discovered among our nose bacteria,. eight to 10%0% of people carry this one species that makes a chemical that seems to do very well against the apple caucus aureus so the microbe behind -- so it might work it might not. there's a lot of work that needs to happen before these things go to clinic but the critical point here is that all these fights are battlegrounds and there's a competition between microbes and some parts of the bodye might he especially fit. there are places where we

constantly shove food down so we bombard them with nutrients. notice is scant and resource unless you're eatingso really weirdly. the microbes have various capacities and maybe those are the places we need to look for the next in the -- generation of good antibiotics. the microbes that produce citizen nasal mike robin this is the type of thing you can get when you think of humans and other animals as the ecosystem is more than individuals that we are and in think ecologically about which part of the body is competition fears among microbes? where might we find tomorrow's microbes? >> i think there's a part in your book where you call that gotal like the goddess like the rain forests in the nose as i could desert. i'm out that's exactly right. we have a few minutes for

questions america microphones set up so i hope you you guys so common as some questions and when you do say your name first and make it a question. >> i'm i am anna. i have a question about vaccines and how they work great for eradicating smallpox but we still have a virus that killed tens of thousands of people a year and is endemic and we had a vaccine and we have known about it for 100 years, and a yellow fever still is raging and there are so many viruses we don't even know about and there are still so many viruses that we have known about and we have vaccines and are still a problem >> vaccines are an amazing thing

the fact that we can train our bodies to be ready for a virus before comes in be able to initiate a way to fight it off is an incredible thing that we can do. but that masks a lot of hard work goes into making sure the vaccines actually treated population effectively. with smallpox it wasn't like yeah everyone get in line to get your smallpox vaccine. they figured out where smallpox was in the world and going out there collaborating with community leaders taking vaccines on horseback into the remote areas of ethiopia trying to get to the last cases. until you get the very last cases it's not over. that's what we were dealing with polio.

polio, we could have been done with polio 10 years ago but it's enduring and very unstable places like for example part to pakistan and nigeria. in pakistan you have vaccine workers who areu killed by the taliban just as a t way of, as part of their political campaign the virus doesn't care. there are built-in problems with vaccines in the sense that the flu virus is a real pain in the neck because it's constantly churning evolutionary and every year there are new mutations arriving in mixing and matching together and doing their own natural biotechnology and you get a new strain everyry year. the scientists making the vaccines, a lot of them are still using the technology we used in the 1950s like trying

to grow vaccines in chicken eggs for example. takes months to do that. where entering or flu season right now just about and the vaccines were decided on a month ago. and they just hope they get it right and what times they don't and there's a situation where what we really need ultimately there are people working on this is to get beyond vaccines and target the parts of the virus that change rapidly and try to target the parts that change never come the things that are central to being a flu virus. the dream is, if written at about it in three different places the dream is making the universal flu vaccine. you were a kid and you get a flu shot and maybe get a booster once in a while like other vaccines, that would be greatld but we aren't there yet.

>> hi i'm paula. idle question of the incorporation of microbes into the genome. when i was in college i heard a couple of theories suggested they earn just pieces of dna reincorporated that really important cell types or organelles or mitochondria that provide energy and the other one was her white load cells. they might actually be microbes at some point and i wonder if there's any credibility to those theories about how that might happen? >> mitochondria used -- so for anyone who's not familiar with them all of ourselves contain these structures called mitochondria which are the settled in shape things that provide us with energy. they are essential for a life and they used to be bacteria.

they are domesticated bacteria that work their way into an ancestral cell and became forever stuck there. that much is absolutely clear and one really interesting thing that i think about in the mitochondria there's some debate about just how important their origin was to the origin of all of us. some scientists believe that the origin of mitochondria was in fact the i origin of the domainf life that includes animals and fungi and algae and all the complex views. all of them contained mitochondria and all of them evolved only once and perhaps the reason for that singularity even though we have taken in

bacteria and turned them into other structures that's the reason why for the primacy of mitochondria may be that singularly improbable event was really critical in allowing life to escape from the confines of the bacteria to develop larger genomes to grow larger biomes. again we are talking about events that happened millions of years ago and it's obviously controversial but i think there is no controversy about bacteria. all of us carry bacteria within our bodies. >> the white blood cells, they are just ourselves but what's interesting is when you look at them under a microscope it's interesting how they are foraging around in a way that is very reminiscent of early single celled carriers like what you

might find in the soil roaming around and grabbing bacteria and so on. ideas that the behavior of her white led cells rolling around in our bodies or using old jeans that we held onto from our single celled protozoangl ancestors and one blood cells sniffing around looking for back. and the blood no different from a -- sniffing around for bacteria in the soil soak me of. over from there. >> it's a great image. >> hi i'm name is emily and i have a friend who recently joined the peace corps and she's been there for six or seven months now because she's not used all the bacteria there she has been sick and has been on seven rounds of antibiotics so far but i was wondering what your thoughts were on the long-term consequences of the non-that many antibiotics in a

relatively short amount of time? >> it's a tough break. the military is investing a lot in this research because the problem travel associated and it's hard because if you bombard the body with heavy doses of heavy chronic doses of antibiotics you do run into problems like c. diff. sometimes we don't have better options unfortunately but i think the emerging science of the microbiome will suggest better options in the future by waste of more substantial blade manipulating the ecosystem behind it rather than using the brute force approach like during his many drugs that it is a canon that's the problem. >> i was just wondering whether

you could speculate on the possibility of another large chains like mitochondria entering our bodies for a pandemic that might change the species or differentiate the species and whether that's possible and what itci might lok like and what kind of future possibilities for integration whether that's a viral or bacterial to change that or even split off. >> well i can work with that. when you are talking about a new species, species basically take an old species and you split it into. that branching process, a lot of it is driven in nature. part of it is those populations not being able to interbreed successfully and there are

certainly cases where with animals when you fool around with the microbiome and you start getting roams with interbreeding. they talk about wolbachia and there are some wool -- wolbachia that may have helped to drive a new species so imagine there's a new plague and people get sick with it can only have kids who are sick with it and can't have kids with the other one and all of a sudden you keep that going for 100,000 years and you have a new species. >> suggests way. [laughter] >> i want it credit on that comment please. >> hi i have a question regarding antibiotic abuse. more specifically with regards to feeding into livestock and cattle which we now mostly due

given that's most likely necessary for large-scale production of meat that we produce and looking forward it's probably going to require a lot of -- because we are going to lose the habit of her meet eating anytime soon so my question is there evidence showing that beef and cattle etc., do you find active antibiotic molecules in a significant amount that can affect humans? >> what happens is these animals are being fed antibiotics. they are healthy animals and they have microbiome as we all do as we been talking about in these antibiotics challenge every bacteria that encounters them so many different species certainly have this challenge and if they have the right

mutations that might be they might be elusive ivan if they don't they die. over time that's going to sponsor the evolution of these resistant deck. a and inside these animals. we are talking about the. in the debt. if you go, you shouldn't be eating meet that is bacteria from an animals guts. the problem is these animals released these bacteria with their manure and they get into the water and then the soil and they are treating these resistances with other back. they become part of this pool over a system that. and so and we put so many antibiotics into these animals that it's a tremendous factor in the rise of antibiotic resistance.

that is how it happens and that's why we need to put the brakes on it. >> thank you. >> i have a question about wolbachia. it's at about 50%, 40% and that changes the question little bit but do you look at since it's so prevalent the species that do not end up getting it why do they not end up getting it for example the tiger mosquito? >> that's a really good question. i don't think we have a good answer to that yet. we are still trying to understand that why is wolbachia so good at spreading from host to host and why is it in some and not others. it's not in any vertebrae like fish. it affects answer pods and

nematode worms which come from a very different branch of the animal kingdom and that's interesting to us because those cause severe disease and if you kill the wolbachia you might gelda kill the disease. different story. there is a lot that we done to stamp it why is it good at jumping from host to host. is it just because it spreads vertically through the population like i talked about mosquitoes or is it good at jumping horizontally from one host to the other. yeah i think these are all questions. there's a huge wolbachia field like a wolbachia only conference so it's a very thriving area and there are still a lot of answer questions. >> the we have gone from cattle to transplants and back again. thank you for coming. we are out of time.

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